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Friday, July 21, 2017

First Evidence of Legendary Great Flood in China May Rewrite History

This flood obviously emptied a large lake and caused huge damage. We also posted on this last year as well. What is interesting is that the events took place four thousand years ago and that the civil response was so excellent.

I would like to see the geology worked up on the flood of the Pleistocene Nonconformity as well. This is where the Pacific surely unloaded its energies in the form of a monster tsunami that washed out over vast tracts of land leaving debris banks.

The sea level was still three hundred feet lower so that may make it difficult, but the potential is there for such a larger vision.

Modern
people have long wondered about ancient stories of great floods. Do
they tell of real events in the distant past, or are they myths rooted
in imagination? Most familiar to many of us in the West is the biblical
story of Noah’s flood. But cultures around the world have passed down
their own tales of devastating natural disasters.New research recently published in Science by a group of mostly Chinese researchers led by Qinglong Wu reports geological evidence for an event they propose may be behind China’s story of a great flood. This new research delves into the field of geomythology, which relates oral traditions and folklore to natural phenomena like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and floods.

A view of Jishi Gorge, upstream from the landslide
dam researchers say unleashed a great flood in China almost 4,000 years
ago. Gray silt deposits are visible dozens of meters above the water. (Wu Qinglong)

“Great Yu Controls the Waters”

The story of Emperor Yu, the legendary founder of China’s first
dynasty, centers on his ability to drain persistent floodwaters from
lowland areas, bringing order to the land. This ancient flood story
centers on the triumph of human ingenuity and labor over the chaotic forces of the natural world.
It’s strikingly different from other flood traditions in that its hero
didn’t survive a world-destroying flood but rather pulled off feats of
river engineering that brought order to the land and paved the way for
lowland agriculture. But was Emperor Yu a real historic person, and if
so what triggered the great flood so central to his story?

In their new analysis, Wu and colleagues build on previous studies of
landslides in the Jishi Gorge that dammed the Yellow River where it
flows down off the Tibetan Plateau. They marshal geological and
archaeological evidence to argue that when a landslide dam failed, a
flood ripped down China’s Yellow River around 1920 BC. They dated lake
sediments trapped upstream of the landslide dam and flood sediments
deposited downstream at elevations of up to 165 feet (50.29 meters)
above river level. They estimated the landslide dam’s failure sent
almost a half million cubic meters of water per second surging down the
Yellow River and on across early China. They also note that the timing
of this flood coincides with a major archaeological transition from the Neolithic to Bronze Age in the downstream lowlands along the Yellow River.The Science study not only reports evidence of a great flood at the
right time and place to be Yu’s flood, but also notes how it coincides
with a previously identified shift in the course of the Yellow River to a
new outlet across the North China plain. The researchers suggest the
flood they identified may have breached the levees on the lowland river
and triggered this shift.

Diagram of the hypothesized dam outburst process in the Jishi Gorge. (Wu Qinglong)

And this, in turn, would help explain a unique aspect of the story of
Yu’s flood. A large river rerouted to a new course could trigger
persistent lowland flooding. A longer route to the sea would impose a
gentler slope that would promote deposition of sediment, clogging the
channel, and splitting flow into multiple channels – all of which would
exacerbate flooding of lowland areas. This sounds like a pretty good
setup for the story of Yu’s long labor to drain the floodwaters and
channel them to the sea.

Flood Stories from Cultures Around the Globe

When I researched the potential geological origins of the world’s flood stories for my book “The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood,"
I was impressed with how the geography of seemingly curious details in
many local myths was consistent with geological processes that cause
disastrous floods in different regions. Even along the Nile, where the
annual flood is quite predictable, the lack of flood stories is
consistent with how droughts were the real danger in ancient Egypt.
There, failure to flood would have been catastrophic.

Around the tsunami-prone Pacific, flood stories tell of disastrous
waves that rose from the sea. Early Christian missionaries were
perplexed as to why flood traditions from South Pacific islands didn’t
mention the Bible’s 40 days and nights of rain, but instead told of
great waves that struck without warning. A traditional story from the
coast of Chile described how two great snakes competed to see which
could make the sea rise more, triggering an earthquake and sending a
great wave ashore. Native American stories from coastal communities in
the Pacific Northwest tell of great battles between Thunderbird and Whale
that shook the ground and sent great waves crashing ashore. These
stories sound like prescientific descriptions of a tsunami: an
earthquake-triggered wave that can catastrophically inundate shorelines
without warning.

‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (c.1830-1833) by Hokusai. (Public Domain)

Other flood stories evoke the failure of ice and debris dams on the
margins of glaciers that suddenly release the lakes they held back. A
Scandinavian flood story, for example, tells of how Odin and his
brothers killed the ice giant Ymir, causing a great flood to burst forth
and drown people and animals. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to
see how this might describe the failure of a glacial dam.

While doing fieldwork in Tibet, I learned of a local story about a
great guru draining a lake in the valley of the Tsangpo River on the
edge of the Tibetan Plateau – after our team had discovered terraces
made of lake sediments perched high above the valley floor. The
1,200-year-old carbon dates from wood fragments we collected from the
lake sediments correspond to the time when the guru arrived in the
valley and converted the local populace to Buddhism by defeating, so the
story goes, the demon of the lake to reveal the fertile lake bottom
that the villagers still farm.

The most deadly and disruptive floods would be
talked about for years to come. Here Aztecs perform a ritual to appease
the angry gods who had flooded their capital. (Public Domain)

Don’t Expect Definitive Proof

Of course, attempts to bring science to bear on relating ancient
tales to actual events are fraught with speculation. But it is clear
that stories of great floods are some of humanity’s oldest. And the
global pattern of tsunamis, glacial outburst floods, and catastrophic
flooding of lowlands fits rather well with unusual details within many
flood stories.And even though geological evidence put the idea of a global flood
to rest almost two centuries ago, there are options for a rational
explanation of the biblical flood. One is a catastrophic inundation that
oceanographers Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman
propose happened when the post-glacial rise in sea level breached the
Bosporus and decanted the Mediterranean into a lowland freshwater
valley, forming the Black Sea. Or perhaps it could relate to cataclysmic
lowland flooding in estuarine Mesopotamia like that which inundated the
Irrawaddy Delta in 2008, killing more than 130,000 people.Does the new study by Wu and his colleagues prove that the great
flood they reconstruct was in fact Emperor Yu’s flood? No, but it does
make an intriguing case for the possibility. Yet previous researchers
studying landslide dams in the Jishi gorge have concluded that ancient
lakes there drained slowly and dated to more than 1,000 years before
the dates reported in this latest article. Was there more than one
generation of landslide dams and floods? No doubt geologists will
continue to argue about the evidence. That is, after all, what we do.It’s always been part of human nature to be fascinated by and pay
attention to the natural world. Great floods and other natural disasters
were long seen as the work of angry deities or supernatural entities or
powers. But now that we are learning that some stories once viewed as
folklore and myth may be rooted in real events, scientists are paying a
little more attention to the storytellers of old.

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About Me

18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.